"Miss, are you from America? Do you know Miley Cyrus?"

I (Carly) started working yesterday on my first teaching assignment in Australia! It was in Sunshine, Victoria at the Sunshine College on the West Campus. Sounds very hoity toity so I was expecting to see clean cut stuck up kids in a prestigious secondary school. It was about an hour journey to get there on a tram and a long distance train, but still in Zone 1 so I don't have to pay any extra than my monthly unlimited transport card I already have. Anyways, I made it on time and it was not what I was expecting. It reminded me a lot of my time teaching in the Bronx when I did Teach For America. One of the teachers told me 80% of the kids parents are unemployed. The school is very old and in an industrial and residential area. I had about a 25 min walk from the train station to the school. This was the first time since I've been in Australia where I really felt like I was in a different country. Although, the country could have been in Africa or Asia. The houses looked different and it just felt different for some reason.

My role is filling in for an intervention teacher who is out on leave for 3 weeks taking her mother to Croatia to see her ill sister. An intervention teacher is a lot like a resource room aide or any aid in a school who pushes in and pulls out kids with disabilities or learning challenges to help. I worked with Marko on Math for the first hour. He has Aspergers and is very behind in school. I was quite impressed with his Math skills once he got going. He told me he was from somewhere in Eastern Europe close to Bosnia but told me I had to get up and look at the map to see what country that would be. He was testing me! It was Yugoslavia. He was very well mannered having a conversation about world travel. Then we had a lot of kids absent so we looked for a class that needed help to push in to. We ended up helping a couple kids on their History projects. Oh, they call the room the Lighthouse Room and that's where the kids go for help when they leave class. There is a sink, fridge, microwave and office in there. For morning recess they busted out the tea and crumpets before I could say "Tim Tam!"

The best part of the day is when I went in to a History and Geography class to help Marko and the other kids in the class. So many kids in the school are performing well below grade level. That was a big wake up call being they are in grades 7-9 and still not reading and writing properly. I was so worried about my second graders back home! I didn't want Marko to feel embarassed by having me and the other aide crowd him so I just walked around helping everyone. They have a week where they get to work in any field they want to get some real world experience. For this they need a tax number so they have to fill out forms, and sign them. Well they are still young and don't have a signature yet so they were creating one and writing it 20 times. They took this very seriously and were getting stressed out about it. I tried to tell them it really didn't matter what it looked like just that they can re-create it and no one else can. So the kids would hear me talking and start whispering amongst themselves. Then one would muster up the courage to say "Miss, are you from America?" I said "Yes" and that would create some more buzz followed by a brave student asking me the group elected question usually about a celebrity or famous place. "Miss, do you know Miley Cyrus? The Jonas Brothers? Eminem?" I told them my sister had see Eminem's house back in the day in Romeo and it was funny later in the day, hours later I was walking in the hallway and a girl came running up to me yelling "Miss, miss, do you know Eminem?" Haha, how fast rumors spread. They also asked if I had been to a WWE match or to LA. They were very curious and interested in America. Many of them are very eager to go there. I'm really excited to work with the kids for the next 3 weeks then I go to the senior campus at the same school for another 3 weeks to fill in for someone else.